I find the visual presentation of data in our business news media boring and often not particularly informative.

Glancing through a UN document on the presentation of stats, Making data meaningful Part 2 and a recent article in the Economist magazine, it occurs to me that there is a startling new world of graphics out there I certainly have not been aware of and that we could be making use of.

It's not that our business news media doesn't use graphs, but they are hardly gripping. Don't blame the graphic artists, blame the journalists who don't think visually. I include myself, because when I wrote articles that needed graphics I only tended to think of those graphics after the story was written - usually just before deadline.

And then as writers we tend to think of graphics as illustration, a replacement for photographs in stories that might be numbers-heavy.

If we think of graphics as another way to communicate, we would then consider them while we are doing our research. You can't produce graphs without data, and you can't expect the graphic artist to come up with the data.

Also, if like me you come from a print background originally you might be unaware of the innovation the web allows in graphics.

Take a look at the Gapminder site, for a taste of how the Web allows for visualisation of information changing over time.

Shahn Irwin, a graphics artist and former infographics designer on magazines and newspapers, points out that a news outlet needs top-down commitment for infographics to thrive. Talented infographics artists cost money.

She adds, "You need a lot of commitment from a lot of people." Journalists and graphics artists and sometimes photographers have to work together to create meaningful infographics.

The business news media is an obvious place to use more graphics, both of the conventional variety and infographics.

Graphs are used. The problem with most graphs is that it is easy to produce wthm with software, but software doesn't always use the most sensible format. Human oversight and the human touch is necessary because human beings are at the receiving end.

For those of us who cannot afford (or think we cannot afford) a graphics artist to produce graphs, the UN publication has some good ideas on what to avoid.

One of these ideas is that is good to avoid using three-dimensional graphics, which however snazzy they may look are confusing and often unhelpful.

Resource: Making Data Meaningful Part 2: A guide to presenting statistics, UNITED NATIONS, Geneva, 2009